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Save the Desert Cahuilla Prehistoric Area
CRNista Larry Hogue passes along this alert: an utterly gorgeous part of Southern California’s desert east of San Diego, near the stunning Anza Borrego State Park, needs your help. We’ve got a deadline of February 15. From the Desert Protective Council’s web site:
A starkly beautiful and culturally rich area of California needs help from anyone who cares about the conservation of our southwest deserts. The Desert Cahuilla Prehistoric Area contains fossilized clues to the environment of past epochs, the last traces of ancient cultures, and habitat for endangered and unique plants and animals, including the Peninsular bighorn sheep.
Unfortunately, for over 40 years the area has suffered from unauthorized abuse by dirtbikes and other off-road vehicles. Now, the California Dept. of Parks and Recreation wants to sanction that abuse by acquiring private and State Lands Commission parcels in the area and turning them over to Ocotillo Wells State Vehicular Recreation Area. While an environmental review process was promised to equally evaluate different management options, including preserving the area as part of the adjacent Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the process has been slanted toward putting the area under the control of the OHV Division of State Parks.
While this process could take years, destruction of the area continues, with record numbers of vehicles observed in the area over this past New Years weekend. Signs placed to protect the area’s natural features are ignored and even knocked down. Tires crush rare petrified wood and other paleontological features and leave scars on ancient Native American paths, cleared circles and geoglyphs. One of the area’s most precious archaeological treasures, fish traps that the Cahuilla people used to harvest fish from the ancient Lake Cahuilla, are especially vulnerable, because they can appear to be just inconspicuous piles of rocks.
Here’s a video showing what the area looks like. (For those of you at work: the Richard Thompson soundtrack is wonderful, but you won’t learn any less if you have the sound off.)
Long-term readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I regard off-road vehicle driving as a socially sanctioned form of sociopathic vandalism, especially in the fragile desert. In southern California especially, the ranks of OHV enthusiasts contain a disturbing proportion of actual thugs. Expanding their access to irreplaceable and fragile desert lands would be an atrocity.
[Update: Reader Rick Hamburg reminds me in email that a group he works with, ORV Watch, is an excellent source of information on the scourge as it affects Southern California.]
The Desert Protective Council is asking those who care about protecting the desert to make comments on the first phase of environmental review for the proposed land transfers. You can do that very easily by going here, and be sure to add your own (civil) comments in the area provided. Or you can be even more effective and send an individual letter to the addresses below the fold. But do it before February 13.
Thanks.
Send comments by February 13 to
Chris Moore, Senior Project Manager
EDAW, Inc.
1420 Kettner Blvd. Suite 500
San Diego, CA 92101
E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Please also copy your letter to the Desert Protective Council at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), and to:
Ruth Coleman, Director
California Dept. of Parks & Recreation
P.O. Box 942896
Sacramento, CA 94296
E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mike Chrisman, Secretary
Resources Agency
1416 Ninth Street, Suite 1311
Sacramento, CA 95814
Fax: (916) 653-8102
E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Include the following title at the beginning of your letter: Truckhaven/Desert Cahuilla and Ocotillo Wells General Plan NOP.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
Thanks for posting this. As a recent transplant, I’m just starting to get acquainted with the desert east of San Diego. It would be a pity for it all to get flattened before I get there. :>)
By: By Miriam Goldstein on 2008 02 08
Thanks, Larry, for the great video, and thanks to Terry Weiner and Larry Hogue of the DPC for working in this absolutely critical cultural and natural area. And thank, too, Chris, for bringing it to worldwide attention on your blog!
By: By jim Ricker on 2008 02 08
Wow. We just did a day-trip through Anza Borrego on Thursday (up the west side on S2 from Ocotillo, then up the hill to Julian.) Figured I’d scope it out for our next destination when we leave SD. It was gorgeous, and the ocotillo were green and in bloom.
We’ll definitely submit comments. Thanks for the heads up, Chris.
By: By MBW on 2008 02 09
Done. Emails sent.
(btw, could you pass on word to Larry Hogue that his book was one of my more enjoyable ones to review?)
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2008 02 11
Illegals are littering and destroying the desert along the Mexican border. Landowners are under seige, the desert is just TRASHED. Drug runners are also coming across the border.
I know that the trash left behind by illegals also plagues Anza Borrego…we need to secure our border!
Nice post…good luck protecting AB.
By: By DesertRat on 2008 02 14
DesertRat, securing the border is exactly what has caused the problem in the first place.
Drug runners are a huge problem, it’s true. I’ve seen the damage they cause first-hand. But lumping migrant workers in with the drug runners just muddies the issue. Cumulatively, migrants do leave a lot of trash and waste in the desert. I’d probably leave a few plastic gallon jugs behind if I had to walk across 60 miles of Cabeza Prieta in summer, too. People gather at water holes, understandably enough, and thus spook the wildlife. It’s a problem just due to sheer numbers.
And it’s all because the border got closed where Concerned Citizens can see it, in San Diego and El Paso, at the natural and humane and wise places to cross.
The drug-runners and the off-roaders are peas in a pod: they tear up the desert with vehicles for their own selfish reasons. Each group does much more lasting and widespread damage to the desert than do people walking through on foot, even if the walkers do leave plastic bags and jugs and human waste around. And the people walking aren’t just out to make a quick buck or get their motorized rocks off: they’re trying to feed their families after our country trashed their way of making a living. I’m not about to point a finger at them when they’re not the ones with the knobby tires.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 02 14
